Abstract:

Value orientation is the result of the socializing influences of the family, school and the wider social environment.
Knowledge of the structure of the value system and the influences that shaped it is important in higher education. University teachers can get to know their students better and at the same time can purposefully design programs to influence those parts of the value system that are undersized.

The presented study reconstructs the process of creating a value system of university students during their lives. Above all, it reveals how higher education has affected the participants' value system. In the empirical part of the study, we used a qualitative methodology – the principle of phenomenological analysis. The research data were collected using an in-depth semi-structured interview. They were then processed using axial coding. The research group consisted of 22 participants (12 men and 10 women) of the 5th year of study, studying at seven Slovak public universities.

The basic research question was: How did the participants' value system form in the process of their socialization so far? The participants agreed that the family environment had the greatest impact on the creation of their value system. Due to school socialization, the peer environment and the media, they attributed significantly less influence. They were very reluctant to admit that their value system had changed during their university education. They presented themselves as mature personalities who have a stable value system and can identify the effort of anyone to enter and change it. They marked the effect of higher education on their own values as implicit. University teachers with natural professional and human authority had the greatest influence on their values. The motive for taking over the values was the participants' effort to resemble a teacher with high authority.

Keywords:

University student, the process of creating a value system, the influence of different environments.